


i keep my closets free of skeletons 'cause i'm much better at digging up graves

by londondungeon2



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Asexual Character, Background Character Death, Blood and Injury, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by "Beasts" by Joyce Carol Oates, The Largo siblings need therapy, Therapy, post-opera, talks about death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24144808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londondungeon2/pseuds/londondungeon2
Summary: Somewhere in the four bones of the canvas is something he needs, has been yearning for since the Opera.He just has to unroot it.Dig his nails deep into the paint.Wrench out the black heart!
Relationships: None
Kudos: 5





	i keep my closets free of skeletons 'cause i'm much better at digging up graves

In a fruitless search for the exit of the Neue Galerie he sees it: the painting.

Hanging austere on the colorless wall, it is squared in this horrid tunnel Luigi steps in. It depicts a youthful girl’s bare legs spread open over a tawny ground. Each bristle-flat stroke makes it appear like overlapping blocks. It is a collage of monotonous colors - the taupe of stretching skin, the white in her curly toes, even the finger that pulls back a fold of her dusty-rose vagina is dull. Among these tints, the most vibrant is the red lake slipping oily on the wood flooring. Her face is not pictured. It stops at the blank eye in her stomach.

_It is. It is injured._

It is a grotesque, a raw ugly he cannot command his eyes to tear away from. The painting dictates to be known like an infantile cry. Styrofoam crunches in his hand. The authority in those voluptuous thighs exhibit such a dizziness in him that it looks minimally human - wolf in sheepskin. Palpable hooks pierce his skin like her legs are trying to swallow. _Look at me. Acknowledge me._ Oil seethes at him in dragon puffs of air. He is looking, looking, looking. When was he not looking?

Luigi tries to fish his thoughts back to before. Fingers rake at the roots of his skull; he is starting to gray. His eyes are still padlocked to the painting. With too delicate shyness, he moves himself down to the wisping heat and “Devil Mountain” dark roast in his gloved hand. Exit. He was searching for the exit after some pompous bitch had sneered in his direction. Blood boils in him. Who did that bitch think she was? With a face like that no one could probably get in up in her direction. He reflects on why he did not stab her, the weight nestles just under his thick trench-coat in pin-stripe pants. Luigi’s mind travels to his therapist and he remembers he is trying to work on his anger. Trying is the best word.

He brings up pure ebon liquid to his mouth - no sugars, he isn’t a pussy. His eyes under a different lens return to the painting. “Thirteen” the plaque identifies. Luigi can not identify the burn in his right lung. Lips pull up in a familiar sneer.

There is a slight waver in Luigi’s monomania with the painting, a needle into his obsessive balloon. His eyes, bitterly resisting to look away, move just an inch to his left. He still keeps the painting in his peripherals. An unspoken part of him worries that if he looks away too long it will evaporate away - like blood, like a life. Next to him, a man who is probably teetering on the age of thirty stands next to him - most likely a peasant with those Instagram art blogs. The sight of a fedora makes Luigi inwardly groaning. 

Just as he is hoping the random lowlife is going to keep his trap shut, he starts talking. “A beautiful painting, isn’t it? It just conveys all the volatile delicacy of youth. And truly, it - zzzzzzz.” 

Luigi blocks the lowlife out before he can get the third sentence installed in his brain. Other people’s feelings are worthless to him. The imbuing feeling is his chest matters to him the most. His therapist says he has a God complex, Luigi’s steel eyes travel in a roulette wheel at that. Can’t he simply want people to not act like peasants?

It is his therapist’s idea to come to the gallery, saying it might help him explore his cavernous emotions he has yet to unearth. The museum has done that, is doing that. Staring into the oil, he feels some emotion never felt before. It reaches up with knobby nails and grips at the knocking flesh of his heart, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing.

He wonder if the unnamed fervor in him is some hidden sex drive emerging but ridicoulness screams at him. Starting, he is a man approaching his forties who’s list of partners has zero names on it - not one of man, woman, or hand. Finishing, he has seen a woman spread out before and felt only disgust as he had struck the GENtern’s peach core with a knife. Whatever stirs in him like disturbed sand is not lust. He flips through his vocabulary, desperate. His fervor is not disgust or hunger, nor a cousin of the two. Tapering eyes search deeper into the menstruation like it concealing something from him within tiers of flesh and blood. 

Anger rises in him, tenser. A flame of motivation passes over his brain. He hates it! The fervor is hate! Delight washes over, having finally named the fitful emotion in his airways. With sudden clarity, he images himself vandalizing it. He _should_ vandalize it.

Tangible weight moves as if underwater in his pocket, flush to thigh and pelvic. No security guard had even bothered to scan him upon entering, he is Luigi _Largo_ \- the meant to be heir of GeneCo as soon as he formulates his plan to dethrone his little sister. Through egregious paint, he can slice his knife through and rid the world of the monstrosity. Even spilling black coffee or someone’s blood on it works. Like a Messiah.

Luigi stands there for several minutes in the tunnel, staring that he forgets to blink and dry air licks away at his eyes, knife in pocket and coffee in hand. Bones are taut with thrill. More than once he builds his consciousness up, thinking _now do it now!_ He only wobbles on his shoes, looking onward.

“But enough about that. What is your opinion on the piece?”

Luigi has forgotten the man beside him. He awakes from the torrent in his skeleton and tendons. Slow, his eyes blink off the texture of sand. “It looks like someone smeared monkey shit and blood on a canvas.” He turns, coffee still half-full in hand and knife clean. He pulls at his scarf as he stalks off, assuring himself he will not return, never. 

Drinking stark coffee, Luigi returns to his search for the exit. He loathes the urgency in his steps if he is going to be spellbound back to the painting, “Thirteen.” It is _only_ oils, essentially nothing.

⛧

“Okay, breathe in deeply for me.”

Unlike his siblings, Luigi despises clinics due to his history as an infant. Most of his development is spent in a hospital gown, learning the alphabet as doctors check his vitals. He grows with people who conceal mouths behind ebony fabric and eyes behind horned rose visors. It seems they all hide from him. After the plague ends, he is spent home, inhaler in hand and three years older. He takes precautions to not step in a hospital unless absolutely necessary. 

His visit now - Luigi is not sure if the reason is absolute but it feels like a necessity. Since his visit to Neue Galerie, tiny hammers are pounding upon his skull like a vicious losing game of Whack-A-Mole and his lungs are starting to short-circuit like fleshy-phones in water. It is like the day after the Opera and his - no. It is like “Thirteen” has been incinerated to the inside of his lids. He blames his therapist with wrath. 

Cold circles stamp around his hunched spine. A shiver skims up individual vertebrates as the doctor folds up his stethoscope. Luigi buttons his dress shirt, watching the doctor. Dr. Nameless picks up that damned clipboard again and scribbles enigmatically on it. To Luigi, doctors are maddeningly circumspect, always hiding something.

“So, what’s the diagnosis, Doc? How fucked am I?” Luigi surmises that the doctor is smart enough to know this equation: if he does not give the correct answer, then he will die - a natural cause and effect. By the way he almost drops his pen, the assumption is pretty accurate.

“Well.” Dr. Nameless scratches at his cheek, eyes glued to his papers. He seems conflicted. “Mr. Largo, I have checked _everything_ ; there is nothing abnormal with you. Any other procedures would not be necessary for your symptoms. You said you were experiencing shortness of breath, yes?”

“Yeah,” Luigi snarls out as if the doctor is accusing him of lying. _Was he?_ A callous hand falls upon his pocket subliminal, barely feels the motion. The skin he has left exposed with three undone button horripilate in quills. “I told you that already.”

“Any sensitivity to sunlight or a nocturnal sleep schedule?”

The question sends him blinking. He remembers his sister’s pesty voice criticizing him for looking like a raccoon and thus making _her_ company look second-rate. As a kid, he decimals his days by moonlight in lieu of sunlight - still does. But, he has never felt this fatigue before. He nods. Moving on, the doctor asks him another question, this time about food aversion, asks him how much he eats per day. “Well, I eat dinner and I have an apple each morning.”

“No lunch?”

“No lunch.” Callous fingers skip over frigid metal and his spine quakes. Luigi hates the way Dr. Nameless puts down the fucking clipboard. Yet, he only watches as the centipede-rows of teeth in his mouth grind together. The doctor adjusts those pompous glasses on his face then speaks.

“Mr. Largo, I hate to come to this conclusion. But given what has happened in the last month, I think your symptoms match more with grief-related patients. The indications are physical yet you have no illness - none that GeneCo can solve. After the death of your father, I think it would zzzzzzz.”

Luigi has to gauge where he is. Time crackles and sounds like a swarm of insects, part of his memory lost. Where - he is once sitting on the operation table. He realizes momentarily, brushing off the cobweb layers blocking his senses, he is standing. A stream of incoherent thoughts rush at him. With a shake of his head, he registers the new weight in his hand. Looks down.

At first, Luigi only sees the knife and the blurry background. Ebony is slicking off his blade in vaporous waves, running over the acute edge. Horribly, the liquid reminds him of the painting. He cannot unfocus himself from it, watching the ichor on the blade diminishing and plopping to hospice ground. Underneath the blood is a storm of kicking limbs. A nameless face stretches with the weights of dolor, eyes pushing from sockets like insects’ backs. He wears a melting scarf of red. Yet, it is all just colors, essentially nothing to him. Nothing is a comfort.

“Don’t mention him.”

The convulsions stop.

⛧

Dr. Nameless is correct - well, was correct - in his inquiries of Luigi’s nocturnal sleep schedule, no different than an owl.

Luigi is unsure how he goes from wanting milk to glaring under the mantle with no glass in sight. He passes the refrigerator, thinking of the tiny safari sleeping on his tongue and feels the scrap of dried innards. Even with the maddening thoughts of thirst, he wanders past the kitchen all the same. Socks scuffle along. It feels someone pushes him in the office chair, exhaustion depressing tangible arms on him. _Sit_ , they command. He does and finds himself glaring up at the painting of his father.

Rottisimo Largo - flesh and blood immortalized in his cancerous passing, a man who could direct a million dollar corporation but never make an effort to tuck his three children in bed. Slutty nurses with red visors took that job, sometimes the girls Rotti brought home would too. The only name of his almost-Moms that Luigi can remember is Marni; she did not tuck him in as he was twenty before she croaked.

This is not about her though. It is about _him_.

As fathers come, Rotti Largo was the most unpalatable of the pack. Aloof and cold, he only had conversations with his children - called vultures so many times - from his office chair. Talking to him was like screaming between two drifting islands. His father never bothered to make a boat. 

Despite it all, Luigi yearns for his approval above all else, above owning GeneCo even. Yet, in his last moments on the stage of life and a tangible stage, his father spent his last breaths cursing his siblings and him _._ Under vermillion light, sweat on his brow, his voice lacerates through - _“you’re not men, you’re creatures. I’m embarrassed by you.”_ And even after his death, he still yearns that final approval. More than once, Luigi places his fingers at the sides of his eyes and drags them coarsely down to the bridge of his nose, feeling water spread thin.

“Why could you _never_ be pleased, you bastard? Was I not good enough - is that why you left GeneCo to her, Daddy’s fucking little _princess_? Why did you leave!” He is sobbing, pressing his lamenting eyes to his fists. “Why did you have to leave? There was surgery; there was al-always surgery.”

Luigi knows the answer though, it is found in the painted irises that frown down upon him like a beaconing tunnel. So, Luigi cowers under the beam and cries from his stitched-up Frankenstein chest.

⛧

He returns to the Neue Galerie after a week of castigating it and not thinking of “Thirteen.”

During his trek, as snow melts from his hundred-dollar shoes, Luigi does not look up once, allowing impetus to magnet his limbs to the painting. Both of his gloved hands twitch inside pockets. His right thumb finds the switchblade button and pushes it repeatedly, tiny mouths forming in his pants. He is uncaring for the shoulders that bump him. Tiny mouths also form on passerby’s knees as he slices through with bone and metal.

A constituent of Luigi knows he is in the correct room, even though he is still not looking. These corridors: he has already walked them hundreds of times in impromptu dreams. Luigi inhales the atmosphere as people glance up at a person who enters the room with such certainty only to stop his mission with a jolt.

The texture of sebaceous warmth is the only way Luigi knows he is crying. The source time is unknown. Had he sobbed his whole way through the hallways to here? He raises a red hand, leather drenched, and brushes away a teardrop. His face gets wetter with each passing decimal. 

Refocusing, Luigi moves towards the bright beacon. It blinds him yet is welcoming. Each of his movements are dreamlike, like an astronaut or deep-sea diver, force depressing on him. His fingers find the skeleton of “Thirteen'' and he pulls. 

“Sir! Sir, you just can’t take that painting! Hey. stop right there- zzzzzzzzz.”

Luigi’s feet scrap and turn in a clockwork half-circle. He reaches out, grabs the valiant wrist of this citizen trying to be a security guard, and raises up his right gloved hand. _Go for the jugular!_ , the painting rattling on the ground screams. Red water floats up in the air. Peaceful, Luigi wrenches the dripping switchblade from the citizen’s new mouth. 

A shriek arises somewhere distant. With no hesitation, he turns glaring at the noise and watches the sound recoil into her husband. _“Shut the fuck up!”_ He roars, blood in his peppering hair and pique ablaze in his stare. 

No one makes another sound, even the baby stroller is silenced by shock. There is no rush of security guards coming to arrest him. He is Luigi Largo - his last name makes his invincible. Pocketing his switchblade, he picks back up the painting. No blood lands on the painting - and if it had, no one would have noticed anyways.

He walks out with the anonymous, week-old fervor and “Thirteen.”

⛧

He slams down the painting, nude and exposed, on Amber Sweet’s desk with zeal. Ignoring Pavi’s mouse-squeak of surprise, his hand daggers down upon the taut, handmade canvas. Already, he knows this is going to be difficult, staring at his siblings - Amber with her scowling expression and Pavi with his engrossed eyes - who he definitely interrupted. But, Luigi treks on forward - desperate for answers. 

“You two,” his asthmatic vocals flare “, you two _have_ to help me with this.” He rakes a hand through disheveled hair, gray kiss-curls falling over his steel eyes. “I swear, I wouldn’t ask unless it was important. It fucking _is_. Tell me what you see.”

With shaking hands, Luigi turns “Thirteen” around to face them. Salacious intrigue appears sudden in his little brother’s eyes and Luigi has to bite his tongue. Indifference appears on Amber’s eyes as her cuspidate nails hover the painting. “Don’t pierce it.” Slowly, Amber sets down her hands. Agonizing, Luigi watches anew as both their eyes scan over the oils. “You guys feel it right?”

“Arousal?” 

Luigi takes a breath. He knows holding back the urge of strangling Pavi is a tremendous deal but not to this extent. “No.” He points down at the painting. “Looking at this, don’t you feel compelled to,” he grapples for the word. “Compelled to cry?”

The two adults’, both younger than him, brows furrow at the question. Pavi with a youthful ivory face clamped over scarred tissue blinks, genuine eyes moving under dough-like epidermis; Amber who is running a marathon with suicide sieves a nail through her months-old hair, still black with bangs. Neither of them have tears in their eyes. 

Then, Amber says what he has been dreading. “It is just a painting.” He hears the word after watching red lips move. His bones feel like they are made of ice.

They are missing out on all the tiny insidious factors making the painting something _more,_ invoke dusty emotions: the attractive, silicone legs refusing to wither to age in their pigmented eternity; the reddish-brown ichor spewing out like watery tadpoles; the finger comes down and pulls at a fold of skin like a willowy dentist’s hook into a bleeding mouth. Buried deep in oil is symbolism - he knows it. Each glimpse causes an acute pain in his nose before he holds tears back. Somewhere in the four bones of the canvas is something he needs, has been yearning for since the Opera. He just has to unroot it. Dig his nails deep into the paint.

With a sudden flourish, he lifts “Thirteen” above his head, studies it in his arm for a blink, and brings it down upon his knee. It tears, a million woven fabric stitches popping and two bones shatter. Coarse breath moves his shoulders as he stares down the ruined painting - a pure vandalizing. 

“Feel better?” Amber asks. She is unimpressed, resting her cheek on one keen nail. Her whole body speaks waves of condensing, tired of Luigi’s infamous temper tantrums.

_“No.”_

Vexation coats his voice. With hesitant limbs, he lifts up the painting and pulls its unfurling spine apart like an accordion until he has a piece in each glove. His body is itchy with regret. Between the painting, he worries he is going to fill the space with a rush of hot whitish paste. Sick to his stomach, Luigi releases the canvas. 

“Do you guys ever think about Pops anymore?” Luigi knows as soon as the words stop, he has said something wrong. He says something no one else wishes to say. Under the beacons of curious eyes, he continues. “He-he died! That isn’t something we can ignore.”

“Luigi, you are obviously under some stress,” Amber starts.

“Don’t you fucking dare, cunt. You were always his favorite no matter how much Zydrate you pumped yourself with. Your mistakes were always overlooked but Pavi and I,” Luigi pauses, an epiphany rushing over him. “Pavi,” he turns. “You must understand it. The painting, you understand it, right?”

“Um, _fratello_ , you know-a what you should do-a? You should find whoever-a painted your painting. Maybe they will-a help you with,” there is a gesture of a limp wrist and his brows scrunch “whatever-a it is you-a are going through.”

Luigi remembers his therapist, the ritual of counting to twenty, and the guileless words of ‘in and out’ for his asthma. Then, all the memories are burnt into cinders by his rage. Tissue squeezes into claws. Fists balling, he twists on his polished shoes. _“Fuck you two!”_ He can barely see through ebon spots, exiting the office, and shifting in his pockets. The future screams are whispers to reddening ears.

⛧

Luigi knows - _hell, he knows and knows_ \- that taking Pavi’s advice is not a smart decision. But - a grappling with ideas arises - but, he needs to find someone who will understand the painting. If his own flesh and blood do not, the creator is the next person to try. He hunts down “Thirteen”’s mother - Phoebe Vinogradska - and plans her death. She knows nothing of him expect from the newspaper articles saying he stole her painting.

His search leads him to a white-singled bungalow alienated from society and on a private shore. Sand speckles on his shoes as Luigi steps from the limousine. A wintery beach is centainly odd; Luigi watches the ice waves slosh back and forth like blue mercury under graphite clouds. Staring out upon low seas, a now-becoming familiar itch twists in his lungs. He hates to think this therapeutic scene of blue tints could have inspired many of Phoebe’s paintings.

“Wait here for me. I should not be any longer than three minutes.” He knows the driver was not going anywhere but manners are manners - maybe his father would be proud he is being civil to the inferior. “And make sure all my calls go to voicemail.”

There is a rickety staircase tonguing up to plateau that her house lies on. The bungalow squats over a cliffside, not deathly high but enough to break bones if there is an unfortunate fall upcoming. Glove curling around the frosted banister, he begins his ascent. Stairs sway and Luigi catches himself looking down at rocks too often. He only realizes how tight his grip is when he lets go.

He glances at the left flank of the building, the scintillas of a garden encrust in snow catching his interest. His mind imagines the quaint life she must lead. As far as newspapers reveal she is rich and widowed - a perfect match. Her time is probably consumed by learning to bake bread and painting. It is unusual to him - he _never_ knows his victims’ name nor does he seek anyone out.

In his pocket, weight sways like the pendulum waves of icy water.

When Luigi turns, the sight surprises his feet to a snowy halt. He intends to a violent spree through the bungalow, tearing it up like a starved mutt, until he slit open her throat - quick and energetic, _with thrill!_ Life does not play to the wills of human thoughts. Instead, he confronts her as she rocks in a fawn chair on her porch.

“Good evening, Mr. Largo.”

He flinches - how he curses his body for it - at the greeting. Cloyed, he wants to ask how she can possibly know his surname until he remembers Geneco. Hell, commercials of him air daily and magazine interviews found in each dentist/doctor office. Pouting, he returns it - for the lack of anything better. “Evening, Miss. Vinogradska.”

“Call me Phoebe. Or Miss. Vinogradska can work - I have not heard my own name for so long.” He avoids responding. “Come, come. Don’t just stand in snow. Would you like to come in?”

“No, I’ll be quick.”

Luigi deliberates over the insidious choice of his wording. He wonders if she can tell with those faded green spider-eggs that he is talking about splicing open the deflating creases of skin on her neck. Artists are like doctors - hiding nebulous things in their arts and clipboards. Like fathers who hide in offices. He mounts her porch stairs, no ghost wails emerge under his feet this time. Does she know that he has her painting - “Thirteen” - inside the bowels of his room, taped coarsely with stotch that he has wept over in a toiling paroxysm? Shame flares at the memory and he moves his eyes away from her. Eye contact is never his strong suit. 

“Do you know about me?” It is a stupid question but stupid questions often need to be asked. He stands, hands in pockets, in front of her oscillating chair. She is draped in two wooly blankets.

“No more than I have read about in the papers. Do _you_ know about _me?_ ” Her eyes hold the magnetism of the painting like her gaze is clenching at both sides of his skull. As soon as he looks, he is vacuumed in. He tells her he only knows her from a painting. “What painting?”

“Thirteen.”

She seems to have to ponder over that. Luigi wants to cut her right then, how dare she have to think over the feeble, _essentially nothing!_ oils that have consumed his life for over a week. “Oh, oh yes. The one with the little girl. My lawyer called me yesterday to tell me it was stolen. It is a little unfortunate as it is my only copy.”

“Only copy?”

“I never left any of my paintings be reproduced. But enough about that, Mr. Largo. Why did you happen to arrive here today? How can I help you,” she smiles, all saccharine and lovely. And Luigi thinks for a mere moment that he can finally ask what “Thirteen” means, unearth all its answers.

“I’m here to kill you.” Or not.

He watches her face for a disturbance, for fear rippling like circles from a finger in water, for horror spreading like smoldering trees in a cindery precession. Yet, to his fascination, the wrinkled flesh only lifts back into that gentle smile. It stirs up multiple mislabeled emotions in him - rage, dread, and a cousin of happiness. This is not a smiling matter. 

“Do you happen to have a cigarette?” 

Luigi is taken aback - so much so that he leans back into the porch railing, termite-eaten wood stretching like a rubber band under his body. “No, not on me.” 

“Ah, that is too bad. I _usually_ carry them on me. It would have been nicer to have one before I went,” she laments, not seeming too sad. “Well, go ahead.”

 _“Go ahead?”_ Luigi’s eyes flash. This is a different dance than he is used to. He knows the waltz of anger rising from the peach pit center of him, the scarlet emotion mushrooming to his limbs, the weight of a pocket doubled with a steady hand, and then he kills - fast and brutal. This is a slower dance, one he is unfamiliar with and is so stumbling along. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“I am ninety-four, Mr. Largo. I’m far too weak to make an effort to fight or to run to my landline - the only phone in the whole house. Sometimes, accepting is better.” 

Luigi wrestles with her reaction, feeling fingers slip over his blade’s handle. Keenly, he can feel how his digits are starting to tremble. _But he can’t accept it! He just can’t! How is he supposed to just accept that his -!_ He stops his mind. Anguished eyes lift to view the lissom figure covered in an outrageous amount of sheepskin. For some reason, her serenity scares him.

“I can’t accept it, though. I just can’t.”

“What is that you can’t accept though?”

He hates her, he thinks. She is a cockroach to him, void of any worth and meant to be ground up. Red should be soaking up in her pastel blankets. “I can’t accept anything anymore. The fucking painting, my siblings, everything! My dreams have been turning … artistic.” Luigi loathes symbolism. He wants the world as a lucid sphere, to be read out like a manual. 

“Sometimes, our dreams turn artistic to reveal something to us. It is quite alright to not like your dreams, Mr. Largo.”

“Is that you painted ‘Thirteen’? Because you were trying to unravel your dreams?”

“I paint to help other people.”

“Your painting has been nothing but trouble for me, though. I can’t sleep anymore! And it is all I can think of, like my brain does not have any capacity for anything else. I need to get it out.”

“Then let go.”

And finally, tranquility overtakes him. It is such a sudden juxtapose that he almost falls over the railing and falls onto the jagged rocks below. It does not make sense - that could not have been all he wanted to hear. Both his siblings repeat the same message to him - _“Let go, Luigi,” they sneer_. But it is the way she says it translates to - you have to let go, unhinge your finger-bones from clenching, but you do not need to forget. The sounds are medication to his turmoil. He blinks.

“Can we do this again?”

“You want to repeat the idea of killing me,” there is no fear in her voice and he admires it.

“I mean, can we talk again? Schedule some sh-,” he halts his curse word for some obscure reason. “Some stuff.” Luigi does not bother to mention that he feels she is a better outlet than the therapist Amber Sweet assigned him to - _for the betterment of the company, she preaches_. He hates his therapists - the funeral bills should reflect that.

“Of course, we can.” Turning to leave, Luigi buries his smile in his scarf. “On one condition though, Mr. Largo. Can you bring ‘Thirteen’ back to me?” She requests it like a mother asking for her stolen firstborn to be returned to her. He knows he should not ask what he is going to - it is her wishes and wills. The painting rightfully belongs to the skeleton under two wool blankets. However, his tongue has been loose for so long.

“Why do you want it?”

“So you and I can burn it together.”

Down the porch, down the rickety staircase, and across the sand, Luigi is left with only himself and a new fervor. He worries over it in his petite trip - thinking it is something rotten. Usually, plain nothing is a comfort to him. He likes coffee unsweetened, his clothing a simple ebon, and mind clear of metaphors. But this new fervor, _something_ , he is starting to like. **  
**

**Author's Note:**

> All the Largo siblings need a "Therapy for Free" card. I also will not be exploring the artist character at all, I just needed to give Luigi a therapist that he can actually talk to without being angry. She is more of a filler character.
> 
> Should be working on some Solar Opposites after this; stalk me on Tumblr: paul-is-a-real-estate-novelist


End file.
